'At barn or byre thou shalt na drudge,

Or naething else to trouble thee;
But stray amang the heather-bells,
And tent the waving corn wi' me.'

Now what could artless Jeanie do?
She had nae will to say him na;
At length she blushed a sweet consent,

And love was aye between them twa.

I have some thoughts of inserting in your index, or in my notes, the names of the fair ones, the themes of my songs. I do not mean the name at full, but dashes or asterisms, so as ingenuity may find them out.

The heroine of the foregoing is Miss Macmurdo, daughter to Mr Macmurdo of Drumlanrig, one of your subscribers. I have not painted her in the rank which she holds in life, but in the dress and character of a cottager.1

Mr Macmurdo at this time resided at or in the immediate neighbourhood of Dumfries. Mr Clarke acted as music-master to his daughters.

BURNS TO MR THOMSON.

July 1793.

I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savour of affectation; but, as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear, by that HONOUR which crowns the upright statue of ROBERT BURNS'S INTEGRITY-on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the bypast transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you! BURNS'S character for generosity of sentiment and independence of mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; at least I will take care that such a character he shall deserve.

Thank you for my copy of your publication. Never did my eyes behold in any musical work such elegance and correctness. Your preface, too, is admirably written, only your partiality to me has made you say too much; however, it will bind me down to double every effort in the future progress of the work. The following are a few remarks on the songs in the list you sent me. I never copy what I write to you, so I may be often tautological, or perhaps contradictory.

The Flowers o' the Forest is charming as a poem, and should be,

This sentence does not appear in the original letter.

and must be, set to the notes; but though out of your rule, the three stanzas beginning,

'I hae seen the smiling o' fortune beguiling,'

are worthy of a place, were it but to immortalise the author of them, who is an old lady of my acquaintance, and at this moment living in Edinburgh. She is a Mrs Cockburn, I forget of what place, but from Roxburghshire.' What a charming apostrophe is

'O fickle fortune, why this cruel sporting,

Why, why torment us, poor sons of a day!'

The old ballad, I wish I were where Helen lies, is silly, to contemptibility. My alteration of it in Johnson is not much better. Mr Pinkerton, in his, what he calls ancient balladsmany of them notorious, though beautiful enough, forgerieshas the best set. It is full of his own interpolations--but no

matter.

In my next, I will suggest to your consideration a few songs which may have escaped your hurried notice. In the meantime, allow me to congratulate you now, as a brother of the quill. You have committed your character and fame, which will now be tried for ages to come, by the illustrious jury of the SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF TASTE-all whom poesy can please, or music charm.

Being a bard of nature, I have some pretensions to second-sight; and I am warranted by the spirit to foretell and affirm, that your great-grandchild will hold up your volumes, and say with honest pride: This so-much-admired selection was the work of my ancestor!' 2

In a postscript, Burns mentions a few gentlemen of his acquaintance who had become subscribers for the Melodies, no doubt at his own intercession. He adds-'all your subscribers here are determined to transmit you the full price, without the intervention of those harpies the booksellers.' This will be smiled at, I trust, by gods, men, and booksellers, all alike; but it at least shews the great good-will of Burns towards Mr Thomson, and his anxiety to see his undertaking prove remunerative.

The strong, almost fierce, determination of Burns to accept no pecuniary recompense from Mr Thomson, has excited much

1 Alison Rutherford, of Fernilee, in Selkirkshire, by marriage Mrs Patrick Cockburn. She died in 1794, at an advanced age.

2 The children of the far-renowned Charles Dickens are the great-grandchildren of Mr Thomson. It may be hoped that some one of them will have such a feeling for Scottish music, and for their ancestor's meritorious labours, as to realise the prediction of Burns.

3 Original manuscript,

surprise. It has been remarked by Mr Lockhart as the more wonderful, in as far as the poet felt no scruple in accepting hundreds of pounds from Mr Creech as the profits of his volume of poems. The biographer might have added, that Burns even condescended to undertake journeys for the purpose of collecting the moneys received by friends in particular districts for the subscribers' copies of his poems. The fact is, our bard deemed an author fully entitled to any reward which might arise from his works published in the ordinary manner. He himself says in a letter to Mr Carfrae, dated 1789: 'The profits of the labours of a man of genius are, I hope, as honourable as any profits whatever.' And on this principle he acted as far as ordinary modes of publishing were concerned. Yet he appears to have had at the same time an insuperable aversion to deliberately writing for money. And this he applied in the cases of Messrs Johnson and Thomson. He had, besides, a peculiar feeling about these men, regarding them as amateurs of Scottish music and song like himself, who were taking trouble and undergoing risk for the honour and glory of a cause interesting to all true-hearted Scotsmen. In such a business, he must act for love, if he was to act at all. It might, one would think, have occurred to him, that Messrs Johnson and Thomson were in the way of possibly making some profit by their respective publications. All that can be said on the other hand is, that amateurship was truly the basis of both publications; that Johnson's had not proved a source of profit; and that Mr Thomson's turning out differently, was highly problematical. Burns, accordingly, beheld these men as honest enthusiasts, whom it would be a pleasure to assist, but from whom it would be ungenerous to accept of pecuniary honoraria in respect of any help which his Muse might render them. Such delicacy would not now be felt by many English poets; but, whatever may be thought of their principles of action, we must at least admit that the Scottish Bard was animated by a sentiment highly honourable to him, and in entire keeping with the general strain

In a brief anonymous memoir of Burns, published in the Scots Magazine for January 1797, and which appears to have been the composition of one who knew him and had visited him at Ellisland, it is stated that he considered it below him to be an author by profession. 'A friend,' adds the writer, 'knowing his family to be in great want [an exaggeration, certainly], urged the propriety, and even necessity, of publishing a few poems, assuring him of their success, and shewing the advantage that would accrue to his family from it. His answer was: "No; if a friend desires me, and if I'm in the mood for it, I'll write a poem, but I'll be d- if ever I write for money."'

of his character.' In judging of the degree of self-denial exerted by Burns in forbidding future remittances of money from Mr Thomson, it is necessary to know how his pecuniary circumstances actually stood at this time. It will be afterwards shewn that his poverty, as a general fact, has been exaggerated; yet I believe that in July 1793, when Burns spoke so firmly to Mr Thomson, a few pounds would have been of essential service to him. It will be readily admitted that the spirit of Burns was one which never could be comfortable under the burden of debt, and that he would therefore be anxious to clear himself of that encumbrance, even in its pettiest forms, when in his power. Yet there is evidence that the trifle (10s.) due to Jackson of the Dumfries Journal newspaper for advertising the sale of his stock at Ellisland, was now, after twenty months, still unpaid. It was discharged on the 12th of the month mentioned, probably out of the very money transmitted by Mr Thomson. There is further reason for believing, that it was at this time that he addressed to some unknown patron a note, of which a fragment without date or superscription has alone been preserved, containing the following distressing lines:This is a painful, disagreeable letter, and the first of the kind I ever wrote. I am truly in serious distress for three or four

2

It is pleasing to find, in an age of mercenary literature, that the living Burns of France, M. Jasmin of Agen, acts on the same principle as his Scottish prototype. This fully appears from a recent book of travels in France :

'There is a feature, however, about these recitations, which is still more extraordinary than the uncontrollable fits of popular enthusiasm which they produce. His last entertainment before I saw him, was given in one of the Pyrenean cities (I forget which), and produced 2000 francs. Every sou of this went to the public charities; Jasmin will not accept a stiver of money so earned. With a species of perhaps overstrained, but certainly exalted, chivalric feeling, he declines to appear before an audience to exhibit for money the gifts with which nature has endowed him. After, perhaps, a brilliant tour through the south of France, delighting vast audiences in every city, and flinging many thousands of francs into every poorbox which he passes, the poet contentedly returns to his humble occupation, and to the little shop where he earns his daily bread by his daily toil, as a barber and hair-dresser. It will be generally admitted, that the man capable of self-denial of so truly heroic a nature as this, is no ordinary poetaster. One would be puzzled to find a similar instance of perfect and absolute disinterestedness in the roll of minstrels, from Homer downwards; and, to tell the truth, there does seem a spice of Quixotism mingling with and tinging the pure fervour of the enthusiast. Certain it is, that the Troubadours of yore, upon whose model Jasmin professes to found his poetry, were by no means so scrupulous. "Largesse" was a very prominent word in their vocabulary; and it really seems difficult to assign any satisfactory reason for a man refusing to live upon the exercise of the finer gifts of his intellect, and throwing himself for his bread upon the daily performance of mere mechanical drudgery.'-Claret and Olives, by A. B. Reach,

1852.

2 The account is in possession of Mr Robert Cole.

guineas; can you, my dear sir, accommodate me? These accursed times, by tripping up importation, have for this year at least lopped off a full third of my income; and with my large family, this to me is a distressing matter.' Strange that he would rather humble himself to be a borrower, than accept of money from a man willing to give it to him as a payment of honourable service. One might have at least expected that, if he was to be a borrower at all, he would have deemed Mr Thomson entitled or called upon to be the lender. Yet no-this would have in some degree perilled the uprightness of the statue of ROBERT BURNS's INTEGRITY.' His seems to have been a nature which recoils the more from dubiously-acquired money the more pressingly it is needed.